Independent Schools, Common Perspectives
Peter Gow was an administrator and teacher in independent schools for nearly 40 years. As the Executive Director of the Independent Curriculum Group, he wrote about the relationship between private and public education and how the two sectors might draw upon each other’s strengths. This blog is no longer being updated, but you can continue to explore these issues on edweek.org by visiting our related topic pages: private schools.
Education
Opinion
On the Inside Looking Out: What to Think When Education's in the News
But then, I live my life among school people--teachers, kids, parents--and I have to be attuned to their needs and dreams. Strange or lurid stories about schools have their contexts, whether we know them or not, and as outsiders our assumptions affect only ourselves unless we forget that they are only half-informed assumptions and bruit them about as expert analysis and fact.
Education
Opinion
School Leadership Lessons From the Sea
Any independent schools unlikely to survive beyond our era will be likely to have failed in moving beyond the most conventional thinking about who they are and what they do.
Education
Opinion
Independent School Voices: A Blog Sampler (Part IV)
My Twitter feed is already rolling like Usain Bolt's treadmill, for example, with ecstatic tweets emanating from epals in Memphis at the Martin Institute's first Transformative Learning Conference.
Education
Opinion
Annals of Teaching: Being Wrong
All the silliness I observe in kids, the behaviors that sometimes require intervention and occasionally generate my inner disapproval, is just part of their growing up, their time to make mistakes both excellent and idiotic, their time to try out new personas and new perspectives.
Education
Opinion
Strategic Planning to Strategic Thinking: The Long-Ranger Rides No More
As business gurus' ideas seeped into academic thinking, it became clear that what was needed was not long-range planning but rather strategic planning. The shift was decidedly toward action based on intention and principle--toward the development of strategies that could help schools achieve specific goals that were congruent with their expressed missions and aspirations.
Education
Opinion
Making the Most of Summer Learning
Most kids, in a tight job market and with families living close to the bone, will have to make up their own summer programs. If "looking good to colleges" is a concern, then kids can really look good to colleges by following their intellectual curiosity or empathetic passion somewhere.
Education
Opinion
The Sky Isn't Falling on Independent Schools
Most independent schools have figured out that what they actually offer matters more than who they are; images of smiling lads in neckties and cheery girls with field hockey sticks aren't quite enough to solidify a brand any more. This means that the motivations that Finn doesn't see are in fact significant drivers, with momentum rising.
Education
Opinion
Legends in Our Own Minds
Right now we have thousands of teachers thinking out loud for a wide-open audience every day. Personal blogs, multi-author blogs, microblogs, online publications, conferences and webinars tweeted and live-blogged, and even Twitter chats have turned Teacherworld, for those inclined to put themselves out there, into a vast buzzing hive of perspectives shared in the moment.
Education
Opinion
Schools, Excellent Mistakes, and Really Bad Ones
When did we lose sight of the idea that sometimes kids really are just kids, who need to learn from their mistakes in schools without being arrested? Schools are supposed to be places where kids learn, where excellent mistakes lead to Aha! moments and not to chafed wrists and rap sheets.
Education
Opinion
Data and Lore: Schools, Reputations, and Facts
We're stuck then, at least for the external world, with more lore than data in determining much of anything about a single school or even about independent schools as a whole. This may change in years to come, if only because accreditors are now requiring schools to show evidence of ways in which they have used data internally to make decisions about academic programs. The challenge for schools, then, will be how to collect useful data, how to analyze it in productive ways, and how to apply it well.
Education
Opinion
Annals of Educational Excellence: To Finland's Exalted Station
As Americans we get serially excited about some other nation's education system. Think the Soviet Union post-Sputnik, then Japan, then Singapore--math!--and currently Finland. A common factor in these has generally been the high level of respect afforded to teachers in these places, a level far exceeding our own.
Education
Opinion
A Time for Taking Stock in the Blogosphere
But I remain convinced that there is a larger role for independent schools, dimly imaginable as being something like a national laboratory program for educational experimentation and innovation, that we haven't yet fully articulated among ourselves as a body.
Education
Opinion
Two 'Technologies,' One Destiny
Schools and teachers have to approach head-on the changes that technology has brought. Haphazard or piecemeal approaches don't serve students very well, nor does pretending that it's all just a fad that will end at some point.
Education
Opinion
Ah, Technology! Always Technology...
Like lots of educators--maybe even most educators--I'm trying to see how this all fits together, the digital and the human. I used to think it was a matter of balance, but I've come to think that it's actually an individualized three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with pieces to be fitted together in a certain order to achieve some desired effect.
